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By all accounts, yesterday’s special council session to
discuss the Cincinnati streetcar was long and contentious, more than 60 streetcar supporters
pleading with an indignant Mayor John Cranley and newly elected council members
still spouting campaign-trail anti-streetcar rhetoric.

After the meeting, Cranley dismissed an offer by major philanthropy organization The Carol
Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation to pay for a study of
streetcar shut-down costs that opponents want to see come in lower than the
city’s estimates before they vote to completely stop the project. Cranley dismissed
the offer because it also came with a note saying that if the streetcar is canceled the foundation will
reconsider its contributions to Music
Hall, the Smale Riverfront Park and other city projects. Cranley would rather make the city pay for the study than negotiate with terrorists respond to threats.

About seven and a half hours into this debacle of American
democracy — which included numerous procedural abnormalities including the
mayor asking Council to discuss and vote on ordinances no one had read yet, an hours-long
delay and a funding appropriation that leaves the cancellation vote safe from
the pro-streetcar-threatened voter referendum (something Cranley railed against
when the city administration kept the parking plan safe from referendum) — Councilman
P.G. Sittenfeld livened things up with something everyone tired of the streetcar
debate can agree is funny: undermining the mayor’s authority by asking fellow
council members to overrule him.

The following video published by UrbanCincy shows Cranley denying Sittenfeld an opportunity to speak. Sittenfeld then asks for a vote to overrule Cranley, which the mayor had to approve, and everyone but Kevin Flynn votes to overrule. (Flynn unfortunately had to vote first, leaving him unable to determine which way the vote was likely to go — a tough position for a rookie politician.) Once David Mann and Amy Murray voted to allow Sittenfeld to speak, the rest of the anti-streetcar faction followed suit, knowing Sittenfeld had the necessary votes to overrule Cranley. Then Sittenfeld spent a few minutes going mayoral on Cincinnati's new mayor.

]]>The Cincinnati Enquirer abruptly changed its tone about the
streetcar project yesterday, writing in an editorial that the city should continue the project and leaving the newspaper on the opposite side of
Mayor-elect John Cranley on the two main issues of the campaign it endorsed just weeks ago.

Fourteen months after publishing an editorial against the
streetcar project, the three-member Enquirer editorial board yesterday spelled
out why it now supports completing the project, suggesting that a main part of
its opposition — and to Roxanne Qualls as mayor — was the
current administration’s inability to “argue effectively for the project” that
Cranley and other conservatives used to take office during an election that saw
extremely low voter turnout.

CityBeat’s German Lopez noted on Twitter the irony of The
Enquirer now supporting both the streetcar and parking plan while the candidate
it endorsed attempts to unravel both — Cranley already stopped the parking
plan. The comment drew a response from Enquirer Editor Carolyn Washburn, who is
on the newspaper’s editorial board along with Publisher Margaret Buchanan and
Editorial Page Editor David Holthaus.

The editorial includes the following paragraph: “In endorsing Cranley, we said
he would ‘have to rein in his dictatorial tendencies and discipline himself to
be diplomatic, respectful and collaborative.’ What we’ve seen so far is a
matter for concern. Hurling insults at professionals like streetcar project manager
John Deatrick isn’t what we need. Deatrick enjoys a good reputation as someone
who has managed The Banks project and the rebuild of Fort Washington Way. He
needs to stay on the streetcar project.”

The
editorial was published the same day City Council put completing the project
into law and Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld announced his decision to support the
project’s completion, which Lopez pointed out leaves Council short of the six
votes required for an emergency clause that would immediately halt the project without leaving it open to referendum.
Without the emergency clause, streetcar supporters could gather the required signatures to put a 5-4 cancellation
vote to referendum, which would force the city to continue working on the
project until voters decide on it in November.

Mayor-elect Cranley will
hold a vote to stop the project on Monday. With Sittenfeld set to vote against halting the project, Cranley will need either newly elected David Mann
or Kevin Flynn to vote in favor of stopping it. Both are on the record as
being against the project but have left room to consider the financial realities
before making their final decisions.

A story by The Enquirer’s
Mark Curnutte yesterday detailed life expectancy disparities among Cincinnati’s
poor neighborhoods, finding a 20 year difference at times between citizens of
predominantly black or urban Appalachian neighborhoods and people of wealthy white neighborhoods like Mount Lookout, Columbia
Tusculum and Hyde Park. The Cincinnati
Health Department will release more statistics Tuesday and a community
discussion on the issue is set for Jan. 10.

"Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which
assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably
succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This
opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and
naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized
workings of the prevailing economic system. … Meanwhile, the excluded are still
waiting."

The University of Cincinnati Bearcats beat UMass Lowell in basketball last
night and senior forward Justin Jackson jammed one in the hoop hard.

]]>Most Cincinnatians don’t view TheCincinnati Enquirer as a beacon of journalistic innovation, but
today’s homepage headline pointing out that streetcar construction is
costing the city an average of $50,000 a day was a reminder of how
interested our Sole Surviving Daily is in drumming up negativity about the project.

Hundreds of streetcar supporters packed the Mercantile
Library last night outlining the several different ways they plan to campaign
to save the project — including various forms of litigation The Enquirer typically enjoys playing up
as potentially costly to taxpayers — a story similar in concept to the
anti-streetcar protests The Enquirer gave attention to leading up to the election.

The Enquirer’s cursory wrap-up of the
event was removed from the cincinnati.com homepage this morning, and it's currently not even listed on the site's News page even though it was published more recently than several stories that are. Left behind on the homepage is a real joke
of analysis: the fact that the $1.5 million monthly construction cost divided
by 30 days in a month amounts to $50,000 per day, assuming workers put in the
same amount of time every day in a month and the city gets billed that way,
which it doesn’t.

The $1.5 million figure has been known for weeks, but $50,000 per day
sounds dramatic enough that concerned taxpayers everywhere can repeat it to other ill-informed people at the water cooler. If these math whizzes wanted to really piss people off they would have broken it all the way down to $34.70 per minute, 24 hours a day. Man, fuck that streetcar!

At least the story’s third paragraph offered a piece of
recent news: Halting construction will still cost the city $500,000 per month because it will be on the hook for workers who
can’t be transferred and costs of rental equipment that will just sit there.
(For Enquirer-esque context: It will
still cost $16,667 per day or $11.57 a minute to temporarily halt the project.)

Also, the note in the headline (“Streetcar, which Cranley
plans to cancel, still costing $50K a day”) reminding everyone that Cranley
plans to cancel the project that is currently costing money seems unnecessary
considering THE ONLY THING ANYONE HAS HEARD ABOUT SINCE THE ELECTION IS THAT
CRANLEY PLANS TO STOP THE STREETCAR. It does nicely nudge readers toward the
interactive forum they can click on and publicly lament how
people who don’t pay taxes have too much control over our city.

(Additional professional advice: Consider changing the
subhed from, “It'll be costly to stop, and costly to go on, but work continues
until Cranley and new council officially stop it” to something that doesn’t
sound like you have no idea what the fuck is going on.)

For context, the following are the streetcar stories
currently presented on the website homepages of local media that have more
talent/integrity than The Enquirer:

CONSERVATIVE MEDIA BONUS: 700WLW even has a relevant piece of
streetcar news, although you have to scroll past a video of Russian kids
wrestling a bear and an article suggesting that Obamacare is the president’s
Katrina (whatever that means): Feds: Use money for streetcar or pay it back.

]]>

A Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge has denied the Milford-Miami Advertiser's request to appeal a 2012 ruling that charged the Gannett-owned suburban weekly with defamation and ordered the paper to pay the defamed plaintiff $100,000 in damages.

In an article published in the Advertiser on May 27, 2010 titled "Cop's suspension called best move for city," the paper implicated Miami Township police officer James Young, who years before had been mired in legal trouble for accusations of sexual assault that were eventually disproven, in its article discussing another sex scandal in the area.

According to court documents, in 1997, Young was initially fired from his job after a woman named Marcie Phillips accused Young of forcing her to perform oral sex on him while Young was on duty. An internal investigation revealed that the two had actually been engaged in a relationship prior and that Young had spent time at Phillips' house while on duty.The allegations, however, were entangled in questions about Phillips' character and concern that she could have been lying about the rape because the relationship between the two had recently ended on rocky terms.

When DNA testing on semen found on a rug in the woman's home proved that the DNA didn't match Young's, he was exonerated and reinstated to his position.

The Advertiser article explained that Young had been terminated for sexual harassment, immoral behavior, gross misconduct and neglect in the line of duty and also stated that "Young had sex with a woman while on the job," which formed the basis for Young's defamation suit.

The 2010 article dealt with similar accusations lodged against Milford Police Officer Russell Kenney, who pleaded guilty to charges that he'd been having sex with Milford Mayor Amy Brewer while he was on duty on multiple occasions.

Kenney was suspended from his position for 15 days, but
was later reinstated even though Milford's police chief planned to
recommend his termination to avoid having to use an arbitrator to
dissect the case.

Although the article is attributed to writer Kellie Giest, the lawsuit revealed that the paper's editor at the time, Theresa Herron, inserted the section of the article that went to trial. According to court documents, Herron added the paragraphs about Young to Giest's story because she felt the article needed more context about why the city wanted to avoid arbitration.

According to court documents from the suit Young filed against the Gannett Satellite Information Network, Gannett responded the to initial complaint by acknowledging that the statement was a defamation of character, but that the statement was made without actual malice on the part of Herron. There is a high legal threshold for plaintiffs to establish a defamation claim, which require the plaintiff to prove several elements beyond a reasonable doubt; for public officials, the threshold is even higher because they most prove that the offender acted with actual malice — in this case, knowing the claim about Young was false and printing it anyway — to win a lawsuit.

In its appeal, Gannett argued that Young, as a police officer, did not meet the threshold of a public official required to successfully establish a defamation claim and that Herron's inclusions were based on rational interpretations of documents on the case — even though Young denied having sex with plaintiff Marcie Phillips, he admitted the two had kissed and the arbitrator's report documented one instance in which Young was at Phillips' house while on duty.

In the court's opinion denying Gannett's appeal, Judge John Rogers writes that Herron admitted she had read the arbitrator's report from Young's case, which provided no evidence that Young and Phillips ever actually had sex at all.

"There was sufficient evidence for the jury to conclude that Herron was well aware that the statement she added to the article was probably false," it reads. "Herron was also reckless in failing to conduct any investigation beyond the records of the original case. She did not seek out Young for comment, nor did she talk to anyone involved in his case."

]]>Many of Ohio’s major newspapers, including The Cincinnati Enquirer,
lost thousands of readers in the past year, but some managed to beat
trends and gain in certain categories, according to a circulation audit
from the Alliance for Audited Media.

The audit found The Enquirer’s average daily
circulation, which excludes Saturday and Sunday, down to 117,754 from
132,076 between September 2012 and September 2013. Sunday circulation
fell to 235,515 from 262,876. The numbers represent a 10.8 percent decline in average daily circulation and 10.4 percent on Sundays.

The Akron Beacon Journal and Youngstown Vindicator also saw negative trends, with average daily and Sunday circulation dropping.

Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer lost some of its
Sunday circulation, but comparable statistics weren’t available for
average daily circulation because the newspaper transitioned from daily
delivery to three-times-a-week delivery earlier in the year.

But The Toledo Blade and Dayton Daily News actually increased their average daily and Sunday circulation.

The Columbus Dispatch also upped its average daily circulation, but Sunday circulation fell.

For newspapers, dropping circulation coincides with more readers getting their news from the Internet and alternative
sources over the past few years. The alternatives have cost newspapers around the country
readers and advertising revenue, and many have responded with cutbacks in staff and
overall news coverage.

Other media outlets appear to be taking advantage of the new vacancy. The Business Courierreported on Monday that Cox Media’s Journal-News is increasing its presence in Butler and Warren counties to compete with The Enquirer. The move follows Cox Media’s decision to merge its Hamilton and Middletown newspapers into a single entity that covers both cities and counties.

]]>

Councilwoman Yvette Simpson is questioning why WCPO used
a man named Jim Kiefer as a source for a story after he harassed her on social media with racist insults.

WCPO’s Kevin Osborne
quoted Kiefer in a story, identifying him as a supporter for John Cranley’s mayoral
campaign. (Full disclosure: Osborne formerly worked for CityBeat.)

When Simpson saw the story with Kiefer as a source, she says she immediately recognized him as someone who has repeatedly harassed her with racist remarks on Facebook.

Kiefer's Facebook page was publicly viewable prior to Simpson calling him out on Twitter yesterday, but it has since been made private.

On Oct. 20, the day before WCPO's story was published, Kiefer posted a message on his Facebook
wall that said, “For my pick as worst councilperson in cincinnati
(sic).... Evette (sic) getto (sic) Simpson!” Although the post included
various grammatical and spelling errors, Kiefer then attached an image
that said, “No you may not ‘Axe’ me a question. I don't speak Walmart.”

Several of Simpson’s colleagues, including Councilman Chris Seelbach and City
Council candidate Mike Moroski, have come
to Simpson’s defense after she posted the image.

The issue for Simpson is whether a media outlet should be
using Kiefer as a source, considering his images and posts were publicly viewable on Facebook. Simpson says Osborne never responded to
her email asking whether he or WCPO is aware of Kiefer’s history. Osborne is Facebook friends with Kiefer.

CityBeat contacted WCPO News Director Alex Bongiorno by phone and email to ask about WCPO’s policy for vetting and identifying sources, but no response was given prior to the publishing of this story.

WCPO’s story detailed criticisms from Cranley
supporters against opponent Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls, who Simpson supports. Specifically, the
story questioned why Qualls allegedly never sought an opinion from the
Ohio Board of Ethics over whether her work as a realtor presents a
potential conflict of interest with her support for the streetcar
project, which could increase property values — and perhaps Qualls’ compensation as a realtor — along its route.

It turns out Qualls had asked for a professional opinion on the ethical issue at least two times before,
but the city solicitor deemed the connection
between Qualls’ work and the streetcar project too indirect and
speculative to present a conflict of interest, according to an email
from City Solicitor John Curp copied to CityBeat and other media outlets.

Kiefer called CityBeat after people on social media discussed CityBeat’s various calls for comment for this story. Kiefer said the images were supposed to be jokes. “You have to have a sense of humor,” he said.

The Cranley campaign says it has and wants nothing to do with Kiefer.

“John (Cranley) wouldn’t know Jim Kiefer if he walked past him in
the street right now. It’s not someone that he’s ever met. It’s not
someone that he’s ever dealt with. It’s not someone that the campaign
has ever dealt with,” says Jay Kincaid, Cranley’s campaign director.
“Whatever his views are don’t reflect those of John.”

Kincaid also points out that Cranley’s record goes against
some of the bigotry perpetuated by Kiefer's posts. While on City Council, Cranley
championed and helped pass an anti-racial profiling ordinance and LGBT
protections in local hate crime laws.

Simpson’s history with Kiefer goes back to at least June,
when Simpson says Kiefer went on a racist tirade against her on Facebook
in the middle of an online discussion over the city’s parking plan. The
discussion has been deleted since then, but Simpson says
Kiefer told her to never return to the West Side of Cincinnati.

This is not the first time Kiefer touted images with bigoted connotations on
his Facebook wall. In one instance, he “liked” an image of President
Barack Obama in tribal regalia. In another, he posted an image of
Barney Frank that mocked the former congressman’s homosexuality.

]]>• I was at UPI in London during the 1963 March on
Washington. I read about it in London dailies and the Paris
Herald-Tribune. Since then, all kinds of “marches” on Washington have
cheapened the brand. So has the obsessive replaying of snippets from
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as if it were the event. I’m grateful to
news media that went further in recalling the magnitude of the 1963
march and roles played by organizers and other speakers. This was part
of the 1960s that I missed.

• Court rulings allow the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
heir to own and control his “I Have a Dream” speech to the 1963 march.
Anyone wanting to use more than a few words must pay. My first reaction
was “WTF? It was a public event in a public place and a public speech to
the public. That can be ‘owned’? Yup.

• Stenographic reporting of the so-called debate over
whether to bomb Syria back into the Stone Age helps build acceptance for
a new war. Similarly, assertions that Assad’s forces gassed civilians
are repeatedly reported as evidence or proof.

As of this writing, reporters have quoted no top Obama
administration official willing to offer evidence or proof. Instead, as
evidence, we have unverified videos online and interpretations of what
the images show. Reporters don’t tell us who provided death figures or
who provided information that White House is using the claim Sarin gas
was used.

• Meanwhile, the constitutional expectation that only
Congress can declare war has suffered the same fate as the Fourth
Amendment ban on unreasonable seizures and searches; dying if not dead.

Germany and Japan attacked us. Congress responded for the
most recent time: 1942. Russia’s surrogate attacked our dictator across
the 38th Parallel in 1950 and triggered the still-unresolved Korean
police action. LBJ was conned or knowingly lied about reported 1964
attacks on American warships in the Tonkin Gulf and moved us into the
undeclared Vietnam War. Luckily, Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in1990
and started Gulf War I. The CIA’s totally mistaken 2002 “slam dunk”
assurance about Weapons of Mass Destruction was used by Bush to justify
undeclared Gulf War II. After 9/11, Afghans sheltered Osama bin Laden
before our allies in Pakistan sheltered him and that was used to justify
our unfinished and undeclared war against the Taliban in both countries
although the Taliban never attacked us. Let’s not even get into the
invasion of Panama or Grenada or fiasco in Somalia. All that’s missing
in this latest rush to bash a hornets nest is a repeat of the New York
Times sycophantic reporting that Saddam Hussein had and would use
weapons of mass destruction.

• If you want a weapon of mass destruction, how about the
AK-47, the totemic Soviet assault rifle that is ubiquitous on every
continent or the simple machete/panga with which millions have been and
are being murdered and/or mutilated. No chemical, biological or nuclear
weapon has killed so many people.

• When will some national reporter ask, “What’s surgical
about a surgical strike?” Nothing unless we’re comparing it to carpet
bombing a la Germany, Japan, Laos or Vietnam.

Other than assassinating Assad with a drone-launched
guided missile — good enough for Americans in Yemen — any attack on
Syria will create “collateral” damage. They used to be called innocent
victims, sort of like French civilians killed by Allies’ D-Day bombing.

However, it’s no mystery why news media are willing, even
eager to echo this desensitizing insider language. It recalls “RPG,”
“IED,” “smart bombs,” “boots on the ground” and similar military
language embraced by civilian reporters for their civilian audiences.
Except those buzz words weren’t for civilian audiences; it was how
reporters assured military sources that journalists were savvy and
sympathetic listeners.

“Surgical strikes” serves us as badly as reporting
unsupported assertions and assumptions as fact. Accurately reported
bullshit is still bullshit.

• Accurate reporting requires context. Why is gassing
hundreds of Syrian civilians in Damascus worse than shooting and killing
as many or more civilians about in and around Cairo? Why is the killing
and wounding of thousands in Cairo worse than endlessly raping,
wounding, mutilating and killing millions of civilians in the horribly
misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo?

• Our selective condemnation of poison gas recalls the
11th-century papal ban of the cross bow; peasant crossbowmen could kill
armored knights from an unmanly and impersonal distance. That also was
bad for the social order. Welsh bowmen faced no such opprobrium although
their arrows killed far more mounted knights.

Jump ahead almost a millennium. There is debate on what is
a chemical weapon and not all gasses — think tear gas — are poisonous.
Poison gas was used infrequently but without sanction during the past
100 years.

Germans and the British gassed each other during World War
I. Communists were accused of using poison gas during Russian Civil
War. Italians gassed native troops in Ethiopia in the 1930s in years
when colonial powers were suspected/accused of gassing rebellious native
troops. Japanese gassed Chinese during early World War II. Egyptians
gassed Yemeni forces in the 1960s but Americans denied using
toxic/blister gasses in Vietnam and Laos. Iraq deployed lethal gas
against its own people and Iranian forces in the insane Iraq-Iran 1980s
war. Politicians and UN officials fulminate against gassing civilians
but they only remind us how selective agony and journalism can be.

• No less authority than President Obama relegated the
comparative to the dustbin of grammar. His speech at the Lincoln
Memorial last week praised King and other civil rights activists, saying
“Because they marched, America became more free and more fair.” True,
but I’ll bet King would have said, “freer and fairer.”

• Everyone’s lauding David Frost’s evocative interviews
with disgraced Richard Nixon after he resigned the presidency. He died
after a heart attack on Saturday.

My memory of Frost is different: TW3, the original That
Was the Week that Was on BBC TV. It was as irreverent as posh Brits from
Oxbridge could be and Frost was a central figure in its creation in
1962 and weekly broadcasts until it was cancelled to avoid criticism as
the 1964 general election neared. Two skits stand out in my memory, in
part because my Saturday night duties at UPI included watching and
filing a story on anything newsworthy that TW3 did/said.

The first showed an otherwise empty set with seemingly
naked Millicent Martin, then young and drop-dead lovely, astride and
leaning over the back of a curvy, modern Arne Jacobsen chair. It was the
same pose call girl Christine Keeler used when photographed during the
scandal over her affair with government minister John Profumo. You can
see the original Keeler image at www.vam.ac.uk. Martin
resembled Keeler just as Tina Fey looked like Sarah Palin. Martin
looked straight at the camera and said something like, “John told me I
was sitting on a fortune.” That was it. Perfect lampoon but there was no
way to use that skit on UPI’s wire.

The second memorable skit followed the apparent TW3 and
BBC late night sign-off. A De Gaulle look alike, right down the uniform
and kepi on his head, addressed the Brits contemptuously over some
strategic or diplomatic blunder. Then the broadcast ended. That skit
was newsworthy. BBC said its switchboard operators — remember, this was
the early 1960s — were overwhelmed. Seemed the perfect jab at the
Establishment by its children fooled a lot of Brits; they thought BBC
really had broadcast a De Gaulle speech.

• On a celebratory note, authorities dropped charges
against Tim Funk, religion reporter for the Charlotte Observer, who
arrested while he interviewed “Moral Monday” demonstrators at the
Statehouse in Raleigh, NC. He was charged with second-degree trespass
and failure to disperse.

Tim’s a Northern Kentuckian and among the ablest of
decades of my undergraduate students. After the local prosecutor came to
his senses, Tim told the AP, “It was clear to everyone there that I was
a news reporter just doing my job interviewing Charlotte-area clergy
about how they felt about being arrested. The reporter’s job is to be
the eyes and ears of the public who can’t be present at important public
events like this protest. That’s all I was doing.”

When his June 10 arrest was reported, at least one
respondent noted that Tim was among the first detained, stopping him
from seeing how police handled demonstrators.

His editor, Rick Thames, told AP, “This is clearly the
right result, and we congratulate the district attorney for making the
right decision. Tim Funk was working as a journalist inside the most
obvious public building in our state. The videotape of Tim’s arrest
demonstrates clearly that his only purpose in being there was to provide
our readers a vivid firsthand account. He was clearly not obstructing
the police. It’s hard to understand why he was arrested in the first
place.”

• Cincinnati taxpayers need to know more about competing —
and inescapably costly — plans to overcome years of city council
shortchanging the city pension fund. The news isn’t good. As the
Enquirer’s James Pilcher put it Sunday, “if every man,woman and child
living in the city of Cincinnati contributed $2,000 apiece, it still
wouldn’t be enough to fill the plan’s current $870 million gap.”

There’s a timeline with his explanatory story that screams
for elaboration: What, if any, roles did mayoral candidates Roxanne
Qualls and John Cranley play in council decisions to deepen the pension
debt?

And I howled at the quote from state auditor Dave Yost: “ .
. . the city is in a fork in the road . . . And I’m concerned
Cincinnati is not doing enough to avoid going down that fork in the
road.”

Don’t try this at home. Sort of like standing with a foot
on each side of a barbed wire fence. Reminds me of a friend who’d look
right, point left and say, “Go this way.”

Maybe with Yost’s sense of direction, Cincinnati should consider the road not taken.

]]>

Although it’s moving staff out of its offices in Kentucky, The Cincinnati Enquirer intends to continue publishing a daily Kentucky edition with unique content for Northern Kentucky.

Editor Steve Wilson was among those laid off from The Kentucky Enquirer yesterday. He will remain at the newspaper for four weeks, along with several colleagues who were also laid off.

Wilson told CityBeat that The Enquirer isn’t backing away from its commitment to northern Kentucky, but acknowledges problems posed by the layoffs.

“Clearly, all things being equal, you want to have
reporters based in the area they’re covering. That just makes sense.
Everybody would agree with that,” Wilson says. “But in this case, they
apparently had their reasons that made sense to them.”

Wilson won’t speculate on the reasons, but he cites cost
concerns as an ongoing problem. “Gannett, like most companies, is very
bottom-line-driven, and they had to do something to reduce expenses,” he
says, pointing to the continuing trend of downsizing in the news industry.

Following the demise of The Cincinnati Post in 2007, The Cincinnati Enquirer
and its Kentucky edition made strides to appeal to northern Kentucky
readers. One example: The newspaper stopped referring to the region as
“Greater Cincinnati,” instead adopting “Greater Cincinnati and northern
Kentucky” — a lede-unfriendly moniker that was meant to show The Enquirer was serious about reaching out.

But a source close to The Enquirer who asked to remain anonymous questioned the success of those efforts, given yesterday’s layoffs.

Gannett Blog claims 23 people were laid off at Enquirer
offices, but it’s difficult to confirm the report because of Gannett’s
secrecy with staffing issues. More than 400 people lost their jobs at
Gannett newspapers around the nation, according to the blog.

Based on information gathered so far, the local layoffs span through the Cincinnati and Kentucky versions of The Enquirer, Community Press and Community Recorder.

A source close to the situationtold CityBeat
that eight reporters, two editors and one photographer are moving from
the Kentucky offices to downtown Cincinnati, with the
remaining Kentucky staff members laid off. Staff members were also moved from the newspaper’s West Chester
office, which covered Butler and Warren counties.

Original reports claimed the Kentucky and West Chester offices were closing, but they will apparently remain open for reporters in a limited capacity.

The source gave the names of five people who were laid
off: Wilson; Bill Cieslewicz, a mid-level editor; Jackie Demaline,
theatre critic and arts writer; Paul McKibben, breaking news reporter;
and Ealer Wadlington, listing coordinator.

When asked about the layoffs, Gannett spokesperson Jeremy Gaines told journalism industry blogger Jim Romenesko, “Some USCP (U.S. Community Publishing) sites are making cuts to align their business plans with local market conditions.”

The nationwide layoffs come a couple weeks after Gannett CEO Gracia Martore proudly claimed on July 22, “We are accelerating our transformation into the ‘New Gannett’ every day.”

Updated on Aug. 6 at 10:47 a.m.: Reports now say that The Enquirer will keep its Kentucky and West Chester offices open in a limited capacity. The story was updated to reflect the latest news.

]]>

Ex-Councilman John Cranley is outraising
Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls in the mayoral race by $124,000, but the
history and research of money in politics suggest the lead might not
matter much, if at all. Mayor Mark Mallory was outspent more than
three-to-one in the 2005 mayoral race by David Pepper, but Mallory won
the vote 52-48 percent. Political scientists argue fundraising and
campaigns generally have a marginal impact, while economic growth, the
direction of the city, state and country, incumbency or successorship,
name likability and recognition, and political affiliation have much
bigger effects. [Correction: This originally said $134,000 when the correct number is $124,000.]

The board that manages Cincinnati employees’ struggling pension system won’t make a recommendation to City Council Monday,
as originally planned, because it can’t decide how much taxpayers and
employees should suffer to help fix the $862 million unfunded liability.
Board members couldn’t agree on the proper balance between benefit
cuts and increased funding from the city. Credit rating agency Moody’s
on July 15 downgraded Cincinnati’s bond rating
from Aa1 to Aa2 and revised the bonds’ outlook to “negative.” Moody’s
stated one of the biggest causes of concern for Cincinnati’s debt
outlook is its pension fund.

There were massive layoffs at The Cincinnati Enquirer
and its parent company Gannett yesterday, including the reported
closing of the newspaper’s Kentucky office. As of the latest update from
Gannett Blog,
more than 200 people were laid off nationwide and 11 lost their jobs at
the Cincinnati offices. The news comes just two weeks after Gannett CEO
Gracia Martore proudly claimed on July 22, “We are accelerating our transformation into the ‘New Gannett’ every day.”

A few dozen residents organized by a conservative group asked the Greater Cincinnati Port Authority
to kill Cincinnati’s parking lease at a meeting Thursday. The Port is
taking control over Cincinnati’s parking meters, lots and garages as
part of a controversial deal that will net the city $92 million up front
and $3 million or more a year afterward. CityBeat covered the lease in further detail here.

While the Port Authority meeting apparently warranted live
tweeting and various articles from several outlets, other local media outlets never covered a streetcar social that involved roughly 200 supporters of the Cincinnati streetcar and Mayor Mallory.

State officials claim average costs for health insurance
will soar by 41 percent for Ohioans who buy coverage online under
Obamacare, but experts say the state’s claims are misleading.
“These are sticker prices, and very few people will pay these prices,”
said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family
Foundation. “Many will qualify for subsidies.” The Republican officials
touting the claims of higher costs, including Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, have opposed
Obamacare from the start.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald is once again asking for an ethics probe
of Gov. John Kasich and JobsOhio, the privatized development
agency established by Republicans to replace the Ohio Department of
Development. Republicans claim JobsOhio is creating thousands of job in
the state, but Democrats argue the agency’s secretive nature makes it
difficult to verify whether taxpayer dollars are being effectively used.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine yesterday announced a
statewide Internet cafe investigation spanning to an establishment in
Middletown. “We are still in the beginning stages of what we expect to
be a very lengthy investigation,” DeWine said in a statement. “While it
is too early in the investigation to go into specifics, we do believe
the alleged criminal activity at these locations goes beyond illegal
gambling.” Earlier in the year, Gov. John Kasich and the state
legislature effectively banned Internet cafes, which they claimed were
hubs for online gambling and illegal activity.

The Ohio crime lab received about 3,300 untested rape kits
from law enforcement around the state and found nearly 400 DNA matches
after testing more than 1,300 of the kits. DeWine says the extensive tests are
helping solve sexual assault crimes.

Just one day after announcing he’s quitting the mayoral race, Libertarian Jim Berns is asking to rejoin. Berns withdrew from the race
Wednesday in protest of the mayoral primary election and debate
schedule. In a statement, he said he had changed his mind because
staying in the race supposedly allows him to shed light on important issues.

Jim Romenesko reported on his journalism industry blog that there were layoffs at The Kentucky Enquirer, the Kentucky edition of the local newspaper. One commenter on Gannett Blog echoed the report, saying the Kentucky offices had been closed down and moved to Cincinnati.

Gannett Blog reports 11 layoffs at Cincinnati branches, including the Community Press and Community Recorder. That coincides with more than 150 layoffs at newspapers around the country, according to the blog.

Because of Gannett’s secrecy with staffing issues, it’s difficult to confirm any specific report. No names have been provided yet.

CityBeat was tipped off about the layoffs earlier in the day by a source close to The Enquirer.

A spokesperson wasn’t available for questions about the layoffs, but Jeremy Gaines, vice president of communications at Gannett, told Romenesko, “Some USCP (U.S. Community
Publishing) sites are making cuts to align their business plans with
local market conditions.”

Gannett CEO Gracia Martore proudly claimed on July 22, “We are accelerating our transformation into the ‘New Gannett’ every day.”

]]>

Local public access media organization Media Bridges is shutting its doors for good by the end of the year, ending nearly 25 years of public service.

The organization’s demise is a result of the city eliminating funding for Media Bridges in its latest budget, which was passed by City Council in May.

“It is with great sadness that I must announce that Media Bridges will close its doors by the end of 2013. The city has made it extremely clear that we will not be receiving any more funding from them. While we have tried many other avenues for revenue it has become clear that we will be unable to sustain operations beyond 2013,” Media
Bridges Executive Director Tom Bishop announced Tuesday in the organization’s newsletter.

The shutdown will be a steady process, with Media Bridges completely closing once its channels are
transferred or Dec. 13 — whichever comes first.

City officials previously defended the cuts to Media Bridges, citing city
surveys that ranked the program poorly in terms of budgetary importance.
For the surveys, the city used meetings and mailed questionnaires to gauge public
opinion.

But Bishop claims the surveys’
demographics were lopsided against low-income Cincinnatians, the income
group that benefits the most from public access programs like Media
Bridges.

For both the meeting-based and mail-in surveys, Bishop’s
claim checks out. His concern is even directly acknowledged and backed in the documented survey results for the meetings:
“Twenty-two percent of meeting participants earned less than $23,050
per year, compared to 40.8 percent of the population at large who earn
less than $24,999 per year. While this is not representative of the
population at large, the data does indicate strong participation from
low income residents.”

Meanwhile, wealthier Cincinnatians were much better
represented, with 11 percent of meeting participants making
$150,000 or more per year despite only 6 percent of the city at large
belonging to that income group, according to the survey results.

The same issue can be found in the mail-in survey: Only 22 percent of respondents made less than $25,000, while 10 percent made $150,000 or more.

“It’s ridiculous that they would call that representative of the city of Cincinnati,” Bishop says.

Instead of using its skewed survey results,
Bishop argues the city should have looked at the 2010 Spring Greater
Cincinnati Survey from the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for
Policy Research. In that survey, Cincinnati respondents were asked how
important it was to provide recording equipment to citizens and
neighborhoods so they can “produce educational and public access
programs for cable television.” About 54.3 percent called it “very
important,” 33.9 percent labeled it “somewhat important” and 11.7
percent said it was “not too important.”

City officials also defended the cuts by claiming that funding was only provided as a
“one-year reprieve” after Media Bridges lost state funding that came
through Time Warner Cable, which successfully lobbied to end its
required contributions in 2011.

Bishop disputes the city’s claim, saying Media Bridges and its staff weren’t informed that the city funding was meant to be temporary — at least until it was too late.

Media Bridges is a public access media organization founded in 1988 that
allows anyone in Cincinnati to record video and sound for publicly
broadcasted television and radio. It also provides educational programs for people new to the process.

Although Media Bridges is closing down, the city is still
funding CitiCable, which, among other programming, broadcasts City
Council and county commissioner meetings, through franchise fees from
Cincinnati Bell and Time Warner.

]]>•I
hope Nelson Mandela is alive and healing when you read this. He’s an
old man with a persistent and probably lethal lung problem born from
decades in prison.

His
colleagues in the ANC are preparing the country for his death and the
news media are full of calls for prayer, admonitions against futile
hopes for recovery, and assurances that Mandela is getting the best care
possible without making him miserable and sicker.

If
he's died since I wrote this on Tuesday, he lived a life of dignity and
service. By example, he led South Africans of all races and ethnicities
into a post-apartheid era with good will and high, if unreal, hopes that
someday, the wrongs of apartheid might be erased.

For
more than 50 years, I’ve followed his career with an interest that few
others provoked. My active appreciation began during graduate school in
London where I prepared for a career in Africa. Mandela, Sisulu and
others were heroes of the anti-apartheid movement. Their efforts to end
violent, toxic white minority rule in South Africa was companion to the
growing momentum for independence in Europe’s African colonies,
protectorates and overseas provinces.

“Winds
of change” was shorthand for all of this but no one expected it to blow
away the racism and segregation of South African apartheid.

That so-called “separate development” of South Africa’s various racial
groups was even, then, anything but development. If anyone doubts it, look
at the generations impoverished by separate education and training and
how this burdens the aspirations of today’s black majority.

By
the time I reached Southern Africa in late 1963, Mandela and others were
on trial, accused of sabotage and conspiracy. Blacks, whites and
Indians, they were leaders of the armed wing of the African National
Congress. In plain words, they were revolutionaries. In mid-1964, all
were convicted and most were sentenced to life in prison. They could
have been executed. Mandela already was in prison, convicted of
illegally leaving (and re-entering) the country.

Our
weekly Zambia News and then daily Zambia Times — hundreds of miles to
the north — were able to report with freedom unknown in South Africa. We
benefited from the freest journalism in Southern Africa, including
Southern Rhodesia, Southwest Africa, and Portuguese Mozambique and
Angola.

When
Mandela dies, it’s going to be fascinating to see what obits and
commentaries focus on: terrorist, lawyer, prisoner, statesman, president
and like Cincinnatus, a leader who walked away from power.

•Tim
Funk, one of the best student journalists I was lucky enough to teach,
was arrested recently for not moving swiftly enough to please cops in
North Carolina.

The Charlotte Observer’s religion reporter, Tim was covering a local demonstration by local clergy at the state legislature in Raleigh.

Tim
is saying nothing, under orders from his bosses, until after his
mid-July court appearance. However, his paper said authorities claimed
Tim, “who covered the statehouse in the 1980s, failed to move away from a
crowd of about 60 that was demonstrating and peacefully surrendering to
arrest.” He “was handcuffed and taken along with the arrested
protesters to the Wake County magistrate’s office to be arraigned on
misdemeanor charges of trespassing and failure to disperse.

“Jeff
Weaver, police chief for the General Assembly Police in Raleigh who
oversaw the arrests, told The Associated Press that Funk did not heed a
warning from officers to disperse before the arrests began.” The paper
said Tim was released late that same night.

“We
believe there was no reason to detain him,” said Cheryl Carpenter,
Observer managing editor. “He wasn’t there to do anything but report the
story, to talk to Charlotte clergy. He was doing his job in a public
place.”

One
online reader commented that it probably was no accident that Tim was
among the first arrested; that assured he could not report how police
dealt with demonstrating clergy. Readers also noted how zealous police
tested federal constitutional guarantees with their orders to disperse:
freedom to assemble and petition government and freedom of the press.

•A
2012 survey of almost 900 American TV journalists found roughly 20 percent
showing signs of burnout and uncertainty whether they will remain in the
industry.

Scott
Reinardy, associate professor of journalism at the University of
Kansas, said TV news staffs increased by 4 percent, revenue was up, and
stations were producing more content than ever before, often as much as 5
1/2 hours more per day. “I wanted to see how all of that played into
burnout,” Reinardy said.

The
KU press office reported his study. He said that questions about
exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy found that respondents
who reported higher levels of exhaustion also reported lower levels of
organizational support, while those who reported higher levels of
professional efficacy — or satisfaction in their jobs — reported higher
levels of organizational support.

Reinardy
reported that 81 percent of his respondents said they work differently “than a
few years ago.” Many have increased social media responsibilities, are
expected to produce content for multiple platforms and have more
frequent deadlines.

“Many
said, ‘I can’t do this much longer,’” Reinardy said. “You’re probably
going to see the TV business get younger, a little more inexperienced
and, as a result, there will be a loss of institutional knowledge, which
doesn’t bode well for community journalism at any level.”

•I’m
waiting for conservative pundits to wonder aloud how Republicans can
tell us to trust the National Security Agency while assuring us, "Government
is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." I guess
it’s the same mental gymnastics that reporters find when legislators
kill money for family planning and do all they can to assure that
low-income women can’t get abortions.

•A good sex scandal ages well even if protagonists don’t.

In the early 1960s, party girl Christine
Keeler almost brought down the British government. She shared beds of
British Secretary of State for War John Profumo and a Soviet spy, naval
office Yevgeny Ivanov.

At
the time, there were public assurances all around that her activities
were sexual, not Cold War espionage; pillow talk was erotic, not
nuclear.

Now, the London Daily Mail says Keeler’s new book includes her admission that she helped
her friend, society osteopath Stephen Ward uncover secrets about
missile movements in the West that were later passed to the Soviets.

“However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. The truth is that I betrayed my country.”

The
Sunday Mirror also quotes Keeler as saying, “The Establishment was far
more interested in painting it as a sex scandal and chose to ignore
claims of a widespread spying network. Far better that the Establishment
be caught with its pants down than involved in stealing secrets. That
was the thinking.”

Osteopath
Ward, who introduced young women to rich and powerful men, often at
country houses, committed suicide as he became the scapegoat in the
scandal.

I
was at UPI in London at the time. Keeler is right. There was a
political/aristocratic Establishment and its first concern was its own
survival. For months, we treaded lightly as we reported seemingly
unrelated events without connecting them in fear of ferocious, costly
libel laws.

But
the unreported stories we heard and traded proved to be less salacious
than the facts as they came out. Profumo probably would have escaped
with modest embarrassment had he not been caught lying to the House of
Parliament about the affair. That breach of the Establishment’s
expectations of a Gentleman, and not widely held suspicions of Soviet
espionage, brought him down.

•Tuesday’s
Morning Edition on NPR included the kind of remark that fuels
conservative conviction that public network is a coven of Lefties. The
host was asking a foreign reporter about the different responses of
Turkish and Brazilian leaders to ongoing street protests. After the
reporter offered the political context for the seemingly accommodating
reaction of the Brazilian president, the host suggested that the Turkish
prime minister hadn’t responded to young protesters there. First, the
host was wrong. He responded. Second, it was obvious that the Turk’s
response wasn’t acceptable to the NPR host because it was hardline
rather than accommodating.

]]>•The Enquirer’s MasonBuzz.com
wasn’t honest with readers about the source of its story promoting
“National Heimlich Maneuver Day.” It was posted by a reporter but
carried the byline of Melinda Zemper. She’s not a reporter and she
wasn’t identified as a “contributor.” Zemper is public relations
professional whose clients include Heimlich interests. She was helpful
when I sought out Phil Heimlich for a story recently. That’s her job. So
is providing copy ready for publication. With so few reporters and
editors, news media are evermore open to such PR material as “news.”
Traditional journalism ethics requires that we be told the writer’s
underlying interest in the story if it’s not by a reporter or
contributor. MasonBuzz.com failed that test.

•London’s
Guardian scored its first of two coups when it reported the Obama
administration is collecting our cell phone records in the name of
national security. The Washington Post followed with its story about
spying through Internet sites such as Google. Both relied on the same
source, one of thousands of private contractor employees with top
security clearances.

•The Guardian’s second coup was its interview with the American who revealed that NSA cell phone tracking: Edward Snowden, 29. The Guardian called him a “former technical assistant for the CIA
and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last
four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz
Allen and Dell.”

The
paper said it named Snowden and published his online video statement at
his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret
documents to the public, the paper said, Snowden eschewed the protection
of anonymity.

"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he told the Guardian, although he
wants to avoid the media spotlight. "I don't want public attention
because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about
what the US government is doing." That won’t be easy, he conceded. "I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me."

Still,
he told the Guardian, "I really want the focus to be on these documents
and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the
globe about what kind of world we want to live in ... My sole motive
is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that
which is done against them."

•Whistleblower Snowden
is the civilian version of Army Private Bradley Manning, who gave
military and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Both were low-level
intelligence specialists with high-level security clearance. Both claim
to have acted according to conscience, hoping to save rather than harm
our nation. There is a difference, however, that I haven’t seen or heard
in facile news media comparisons of Snowden to Manning or Daniel
Ellsberg, an academic defense analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers.
Manning’s military and diplomatic cables and Ellsberg’s study of the
Vietnam war were in the broadest sense histories. Snowden’s revelations
involve current and future data collection and analysis.

•Mother
Jones magazine/online also scored two scoops in recent days. It says
the Justice Department wants to hide an 86-page opinion by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court that says the government
violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in
unconstitutional spying. Mother Jones’ bureau chief in Washington, David
Corn, says the secrecy effort is a response to a Freedom of Information
suit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

•In
its second coup, Mother Jones says the FBI raided the Winchester, Ky.,
home of corporate cybersecurity consultant Deric Lostutter. As hacker
KYAnonymous, he was instrumental in making the Steubenville rape case a
national story. Mother Jones says Lostutter “obtained and published
tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about
the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man
behind the mask in a videoposted by another hacker on the team's fan page, RollRedRoll.com,
where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized
to the girl ... According to the FBI's search warrant, agents were
seeking evidence related to the hacking of RollRedRoll.com ... If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up
to 10 years behind bars — far more than the one- and two-year sentences
doled out to the Steubenville rapists.”

•Local
news media embrace an uncritical “boost, don’t knock” approach to local
festivals. Even so, they ignored a great photo op at the opening of
Summer Fair. Hundreds of people stood in line in the Coney Island
parking lot while two people — at one table — took admission money. Some
people waited more than 30 minutes to get in. Parking was free, so no
one knows how many potential customers took one look and drove away.

•A
recent Enquirer cover story confirms what a lot of people have known for
years: Go elsewhere for sophisticated cancer care. What’s news is the
admission in a proposed UC major investment to bring advanced cancer
care here.

•Another
Enquirer cover story made my prehensile toes curl with joy. The
Creation Museum is evolving to allow us to return to tree tops ...
via zip lines.

•I’m
still unhappy about NPR’s decision to kill Talk of the Nation carried
here 2-4 p.m. Monday-Thursday. It was the nation’s best long-format
public radio interview program, sort of a New Yorker of the air.

Starting
July 1, WVXU plans to fill the newly vacant 2-3 p.m. gap with an
expanded Cincinnati Edition using current staff as hosts. I hope it
retains long-format interviews.

With
its limited resources newly devoted to the expanded Monday-Thursday
Cincinnati Edition, WVXU is ending Maryanne Zeleznik’s Thursday morning
long-format Impact Cincinnati interview show and the staff’s Saturday
and Sunday one-hour weekend Cincinnati Edition. There were good regular
segments and I hope they’ll be woven into the new format.

To fill 3-4 p.m. Monday-Thursday, WVXU is bringing in The Takeaway. WVXU says it’s
is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in
collaboration with New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston. The Takeawaycarries the tagline, “Welcome to the American Conversation.” We’ll see. Talk of the Nation set a very high standard.

•Sunday’s
Enquirer Forum calls on Ohio to expand Medicaid despite a shortage of
physicians and others to cope. In part, the paper notes, few med school
grads choose primary care. Reasons aren’t that complicated. Relatively
low salaries paid to primary care physicians mean docs will spend a good
portion of their adult lives repaying loans that often began as
undergrads and compounded while adding med school loans. Another reason
is that Medicaid pays even less than Medicare for office visits and
treatments. That’s helps explain why primary care docs aren’t better
paid and some practices limit their Medicaid and Medicare patients.

The
Enquirer should dig still deeper into related issues. Why should
taxpayers provide health insurance (Medicaid or unpaid emergency care)
to badly paid workers whose major employers provide little or no health
care insurance? Why do we as a nation offer such niggardly support to
med students that they opt for higher paid specialties which ease loan
repayments? (This isn’t a personal beef. Our daughter, whose board
certifications include family practice, went through medical school on a
UC scholarship but many classmates graduated with life-limiting debt.)

•NPR
had a long story on how jelly fish are multiplying at a rate that
creates or exacerbates problems in the oceans. These prehistoric
creatures survive, multiply and prosper without a spine or brain. Apt
analogies encouraged.

•The
cascade of information about NSA snooping has an unintended benefit.
Pervasive federal intrusions no longer are “just a journalists’ thing.”
Millions of Americans now know their cell phone calls and email/Internet
data are being collected and analyzed by NSA computers and agents. This growing consciousness may provoke a groundswell that could provide
brains and spine for Congress to correct police state legislation passed
after 9/11.

•Eric
Holder — still U.S. attorney general when this was written — is almost
contrite about Justice Department grabbing reporters’ telephone and
email records. He now says he won’t prosecute reporters just doing our
jobs. Any journalist who accepts
his assurance lacks the minimum skepticism required for our trade.
Holder serves at the pleasure of a president whose antipathy to leaks
recalls Nixon’s creation of the Plumbers.

•NKU
dropout Gary Webb shared the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for San Jose
Mercury’s coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Then he took on the
CIA in his sometimes-overreaching 1996 Mercury series, Dark Alliance,
which said crack cocaine was being sold in Los Angeles’ black ghettos to
support CIA-supported contras in Nicaragua. The LA Times and others —
including the NYTimes and Washington Post — were embarrassed by Webb and
the nowhere San Jose paper. They went all out to discredit Webb and his
findings. Webb’s errors and inadequately supported assertions gave
critics their opening. Irrespective of the the national papers’ attacks
inaccuracies and misdirection, they ruined Webb’s career and he
committed suicide. Years later, even former critics acknowledged the
generally substantiated core of Webb’s series: CIA ignored Contra
cocaine smuggling and its spread of crack in U.S. inner cities. A movie
is being made about Webb and the CIA series, Kill the Messenger.

•NPR’s
Morning Edition described in broad detail an NSA data center going up
outside Salt Lake City. Computers are so large and hot that they will
need 1.5 million gallons of cooling water daily. I wish NPR told me
where that water was coming from and where it would go after being used
to cool the computers.

•With friends like this ... Aljazeera.com
reports that Syrian rebels executed a 15-year-old Aleppo coffee vendor
in front of his family because the killers thought a common Syrian
retort was blasphemy. The youth apparently refused someone coffee on
credit, saying, “Even if Mohammad comes down, I will not give it as a
debt.”

•Obama’s
meeting at Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, Calif.,
pricked my nostalgia. In the early 1940s, my father, an Army physician,
was stationed in Palm Springs. A visionary local developer offered Dad
some land. As our family legend goes, that friend assured my father that
“after the war,” Palm Springs would boom. Headed for combat in Europe
and uncertain what might follow, Dad said thanks, but no thanks. Oh,
well. If Dad had taken his friend’s offer, last week’s Obama-Xi meeting
could have been on a Kaufman desert hideaway, “10,000 Lakes.”

]]>•Some
Cincinnati IRS employees violated IRS rules and maybe the law by
harassing scores of Tea Party and similar conservative groups seeking
vital nonprofit status.

As
an example of IRS intrusiveness, the Enquirer reports that the Liberty
Township Tea Party received a questionnaire demanding information the
IRS is not allowed to seek. “The letter was signed by a local IRS
official, who did not return calls seeking comment,” the paper initially
reported. Who? Name names. If the IRS employee signed and sent an
official government document, there’s no reason to grant anonymity.

Later
in its initial full page A-section story, the Enquirer quotes Ohio IRS
spokeswoman Jennifer Jenkins saying, “Mistakes were made.” By whom?
Again, names, please. Americans increasingly favor the passive voice,
“mistakes were made” but no one made them. If the paper pressed for
names of mistake-makers, it’s not evident. And who was fired? Anyone?

The
Associated Press — whose reporter broke this scandal story — says the
Cincinnati mess is at least two years old. This isn’t new. We’ve seen
IRS harassment of activists before and probably will again. Each time,
it’s a scandal. Or should be.

Any
loss of residual confidence in IRS nonpartisanship is a helluva lot more
serious than the muddle surrounding the killing of four Americans in
Benghazi or the murder of three spectators at the Boston marathon.

I’m
sure it’s coincidence that the Cincinnati IRS harassment preceded the
2012 election. And I’m sure those employees were motivated only by zeal
to protect the purity of the 501(c)(4) status from improper or illegal
political activity. But I’m also sure that any agnostic or atheist
Republicans are looking at this Cincinnati-born national IRS scandal as
proof that “there is a God.” Now, to keep that wrath boiling with
hearings until 2014 elections.

•The
Associated Press says it’s the target of a sweeping Justice Department
search for the news service’s confidential sources. Monday, AP reported
the Justice Department “secretly obtained two
months of telephone records of reporters and editors . . . in what the
news cooperative's top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented
intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.

“The
records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for
the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP
office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main
number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery,
according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also
included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

“In
all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate
telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of
2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during
that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices
where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about
government and other matters.”

Maybe it’s time to call in the Plumbers.

•I’m
no fan of public radio’s Ira Glass. His whiney voice sends me to WLW
700 AM radio for something more insanely macho. Now, he’s shoveling
natural soil enrichment in recorded promos for public radio fund
raising. I heard them on WVXU-FM’s just-ended fund drive. His point: We
should all be happy because everyone who listens to public radio helps
support public radio. Not true. Never will be. At WVXU, fewer than 10 percent
of us donate to its support. That means Ira Glass’s everyone are mostly
parasites, listening but not paying. (Our family is a sustaining member
of WVXU and WGUC . . . )

•How
do our local news media track Macy’s commitment to ethical sourcing of
its house-brand clothing from Asian countries where factory fires,
collapses, etc., are just a cost of doing business? Contracts go where
labor is cheapest. People work or go hungry. It’s only going to get
worse when huge numbers of youngsters mature. Macy’s said the right
things after hundreds died after a Bangladesh factory crumbled, but now
it’s up to reporters to stay on the story.

•I
glad Macy’s says it will continue to buy products made in Bangladesh.
Pleasing writers of anguished Letters to the Editor and leaving
Bangladesh in a virtuous huff doesn’t employ or feed anyone. I’ve been
in and out of developing countries for half a century. Lots of cheap
unskilled or semi-skilled labor feeds more families than one machine
(that breaks and rusts unrepaired). Whether it’s subsistence farming,
breaking stones with hammers for roadbeds, pedaling a rickshaw or
laborers carrying building materials up ladders in baskets on their
heads, it’s work that feeds. We can feel guilty, but walking away helps
no one...else.

•BBC
accuses the Plain Dealer of racist news judgment over stories about
kidnapped young women freed recently after a decade of imprisonment and
abuse. BBC based its provocative judgment on its count of stories about
two of the three young women, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. “In
Cleveland, the newspaper stories were mainly about the white girl,” BBC
News Magazine reporter Tara McKelvey wrote. “In the 10 years Berry was
missing, the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper published 36 articles
about her, according to a search of electronic news archive Lexis-Nexis.
During the nine-year period that DeJesus, who is Hispanic, was missing, the newspaper published 19 articles about her case.”

This
is typical of American news media where MWW (Missing White Woman) gets
more coverage than black or Hispanic girls and women, according to
academics McKelvey quoted.

But
Chris Quinn, the Plain Dealer’s assistant managing editor/metro, rejects
McKelvey’s accusation. He says it’s not only wrong but “based on an
analysis so simplistic we would have thought it beneath an organization
such as yours.” Quinn said his “much more thorough review” shows the
reverse of the BBC tally. “The number of stories about DeJesus actually
is greater than the number mentioning Berry, contrary what you assert.
Your analysis did not include all variations of the DeJesus first name, a
rather glaring lapse.”

Quinn
continued, “Because of the racial aspect your network chose to focus
on, we also included in our review stories about Shakira Johnson, a
black child who went missing around the same time as Amanda and Gina.
The hunt for Shakira was as big a community effort as the hunt for the
other missing girls.” Here’s his tally:

And
Quinn closed, “The suggestion that this newspaper has used race as any
kind of filter in its story choices is offensive in the extreme. We’re
shocked that such a poorly reported story could be posted by a network
with your reputation.”

•You
can thank Time magazine and writer Steven Brill for prying comparative
hospital costs from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Enquirer carried a sample for local hospitals.

According to Poynter.com,
the journalism website, Brian Cook at the department’s Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services tells Brill the move “comes in part”
because of Brill’s article from March about health-care costs. HHS
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is also offering $87 million to the states
to create what she calls “health-care-data-pricing centers.”

Poynter
continues, saying the centers will make pricing transparency more local
and user friendly than the giant data file. Brill says the report
“should become a tip sheet for reporters in every American city and
town, who can now ask hospitals to explain their pricing...If your
medical insurance requires you pay a percentage of a procedure’s cost,
that’s very useful information.”

•When
are reporters going to call their bluff when speakers wax lyrical about
the joys of good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns? Instead of
spreading these fantasies, interview people who train others in the
defensive use of handguns. Or talk to police and military firearms
instructors and combat veterans on how difficult it can be to overcome
the normal resistance to shooting another person.

Look
at news stories that describe how many rounds officers fired in armed
confrontations; adrenalin does nothing to steady the gun hand or
restrain how many times an officer pulls the trigger. And these are the
best we have.

I’ve
used handguns for more than 50 years. I passed the official Ohio
12-hour concealed/carry course for a CityBeat cover story. If anyone
thinks that training prepared them to provide armed response in schools,
movie theaters, malls, etc., they’re suffering a potentially deadly
delusion. It’s time reporters began to add that context to the debate of
guns in our society.

•College
campuses are perfect for training student reporters. These schools
typically are rich with conflicts of interest, executives with edifice
complexes, misspent millions, and bureaucrats eager to escape blame or
avoid offending alumni. The Columbus Dispatch reported this example last
week about suburban Otterbein University, a United Methodist four-year
school.

It said Otterbein
agreed to stop requiring students involved in sexual-assault cases to
sign confidentiality agreements because student newspaper journalists
discovered it was violating federal law. After
initially denying it, the Dispatch reported, an Otterbein official told
reporters for the student newspaper that he didn’t realize Otterbein had
had victims, as well as others, sign a nondisclosure clause.

“We
just followed the bread crumbs,” Chelsea Coleman, a 21-year-old
journalism and publicrelations major who wrote the Tan & Cardinal
story with another student, told the Dispatch.

•One
need not agree with Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman to appreciate
his recent criticism of how news media handle stories involving
expertise. In his New York Times op-ed column, Krugman singles out the
Washington Post but he could have included many if not most news media.

Citing
a controversial study by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth
Rogoff, the Post warned that Americans are “dangerously near the 90 percent
mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.”
Krugman pounced. “Notice the
phrasing: ‘economists,’ not ‘some economists,’ let alone ‘some
economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good
credentials,’ which was the reality.”

Reporters
can be too eager to substitute formulaic brevity for accuracy: doctors
say, psychologists say, weight loss experts say, police say, reporters
say, etc. My advice: beware of any news story that identifies someone as
an “expert” without a clear explanation of their expertise.

]]>•In a
disturbing decision, public radio’s Radiolab (WVXU-FM 8 p.m. Sundays)
gave Cincinnatian Phil Heimlich critical control over its March 5
program on Phil’s dad, Henry Heimlich.

Phil
arranged the interview with the aging physician, for whom the Heimlich
Maneuver is named. However, producer Pat Walters had to promise to
exclude the voice of Phil’s estranged younger brother, Peter, from any
subsequent broadcast.

Peter is a scathing critic of their father’s therapeutic claims for the Maneuver and more recent medical experiments.

Phil
told Curmudgeon that he feared Walters would ask their father about the
troubled family relationships. “Like any son, I’m somewhat protective
of him,” Phil said. “He’s 93 . . . We don’t let just anybody come up and
interview him.”

Peter told Curmudgeon that he was unaware of this bargain when he cooperated with Walters for the Radiolab story.

I
have no trouble with Phil’s setting conditions for arranging the
interview. My beef is with Radiolab. It could have refused. Similarly,
I’m not going into Heimlich’s therapeutic theories and claims; I’m
writing about Radiolab’s handling of the story.

I’m
troubled by Radiolab’s willingness to silence an important critic and a
source of its information in exchange for access to the elder Heimlich.
Further, if Walters failed to tell Peter about his deal with Phil,
that’s unethical, especially since Walters told Peter, “I want you to
speak for yourself.”

Peter
elaborated in a recent email to Curmudgeon: “I was first approached by
Radiolab last August when they asked to interview me for broadcast. I
wasn't informed that, five months earlier, they'd cut the censorship
deal, so they obtained my interview under false pretenses. Further, in
the following months, Radiolab producer Pat Walters took up hours of my
time, encouraging me to provide him with information and documents. I
only learned about the censorship deal a couple weeks ago, when the
program disclosed it on their website. If I'd known that Radiolab was
this underhanded, I wouldn't have given them a minute of my time -- and
I'd encourage other sources to keep their distance.”

Over the years, Peter has dealt with lots of reporters. I asked, "Have you encountered this kind of deal before?"

Peter responded, “I've never heard of a deal like this . . . and how many other Radiolab stories have included deals like this?”

Radiolab’s
website includes a link to the 25-minute program, including the
interview with Heimlich. Radiolab’s website text says:

“In
the 1970s, choking became national news: thousands were choking to
death, leading to more accidental deaths than guns. Nobody knew what to
do. Until a man named Henry Heimlich came along with a big idea. Since
then, thousands and thousands — maybe even millions — have been
rescued by the Heimlich maneuver. Yet the story of the man who invented
it may not have such a happy ending.

“Producer
Pat Walters wouldn't be here without the Heimlich maneuver — it saved
his life when he was just 11 years old. And one day he started wondering
- who was Heimlich, anyway? And how did he come up with his choking
remedy? Pat had always kinda assumed Heimlich died in the mid-1800s. Not
so. The man is very much alive: he's 93 years old, and calls
Cincinnati, Ohio, home.”

Given
the conflict of interest, letting choking survivor Walters do the
interview was a mistake. Here are the guts of Radiolab’s online
Producer’s Note:

“We made some minor changes to this story that do not alter the substance.

“(W)e
removed the audio of Peter Heimlich, Henry Heimlich’s son, from the
version now on the site. When we approached Henry’s other son Phil to
arrange an interview with his father, one of Phil’s conditions was that
we not air audio of Peter. We thought he’d waived that provision in a
subsequent conversation but he contends he did not. So we are honoring
the original request.”

The
version available online begins with a light-hearted exchange among
Radiolab personalities in their WNYC studio of New York Public Radio.
The conversation between Walters and Henry Heimlich at Heimlich’s home
maintains that chummy tone.

Then
Walters shifts to controversies over Heimlich’s Maneuver to resuscitate
drowning victims and other medical theories. Walters also interviews
experts who disagree with Heimlich. When Walters lets Heimlich speak
for himself, the physician accuses critics of jealousy and
self-interest.

Walters
lets the American Red Cross explain why it (quietly) abandoned decades
of support for the Maneuver as the first response to choking and
returned common backslaps.

“Nonsense,” Heimlich responded.

The
Red Cross also abandoned Heimlich’s name for its maneuver. Now, it’s
“abdominal thrusts.” Heimlich says abdominal thrusts are not the same as
his Maneuver and he’s offended by the whole affair.

Peter — who provided emails from which I worked — continues to press Radiolab
on its decision to erase his voice from its broadcast. Its latest
response refers him to the program’s original online statements.

•Stunning,
avoidable reporting mistakes followed the Boston Marathon bombing. They
began when the New York Post said a Saudi man was hospitalized, under
guardand might be a bomber. Days later, as the hunt ended, CNN said
the captured younger suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was driven away by
police. CNN said Tsarnaev was not wounded or his wounds were so slight
that no ambulance was required. Wrong. He left in an ambulance; his
wounds were so serious that it was unclear when he would speak to
interrogators or appear in court.

•Was
there a gun battle after a Watertown resident saw the wounded man in
his boat and called police? Some media say no gun was found or the
19-year-old didn’t shoot.

•Speaking of mistakes, Businessinsider.com
described another blunder when reporters didn’t name sources or verify
leaks. “According to a source at CNN, the network was the first to
report that a suspect had been identified. Anchor John King sent in a
report around 1 p.m. that a source ‘briefed’ on the investigation had
told King a positive identification had been made. CNN Washington bureau
chief Sam Feist approved that report, according to the source.

“According
to the source, who was reviewing internal email logs, Fran Townsend was
the first at the network to say that an arrest had been made. ‘As I
think everyone knows, we really fucked up. No way around it,’ the source
said.

“The
source said that the network's email network went quiet for a 15-minute
period shortly after the retraction — ‘so people [were] either being
more cautious or getting yelled at.’

“Townsend's
report came around the same time as other outlets, including the
Associated Press and the Boston Globe, also reported an arrest, so it is
not clear whether CNN was the first to make the mistake . . .
Wednesday's false arrest reports also drew a scathing rebuke from the FBI,
which urged the press ‘to exercise caution and attempt to verify
information through appropriate official channels before reporting’."

This
is shabby journalism. CNN went with a report attributed to someone who
had been briefed by someone who knew something. No names. No
identifiable links to investigation. Simply assertions. We could have
waited until CNN verified or debunked the report but editors fear that
hesitation can drive viewers to other, less scrupulous sources. At least
Businessinsider.com appeared accurate in its use of its unnamed CNN sources.

•Social
media — better called anti-social media in the aftermath of the
marathon bombings - spread so much misinformation and falsely accused so
many young men that the FBI had to release images of its suspects: the Tsarnaev brothers. It was the only way to protect wrongly accused men
from vigilante justice, even though the suspects might be following the
chase on their cellphones.

•London’s Daily Mail reported some inadvertent humor among the errors:

Boston’s
Fox 4 scrolled across the bottom of the screen that the suspect sought
in Watertown was “19-year-old Zooey Deschanel.” Alerted to her new and
unwanted celebrity, Uproxx.com said, the 33-year-old star of the Fox sitcom, New Girl, tweeted, “Whoa! Epic closed captioning FAIL!”

Gawker.com
said NBC anchor Brian Williams cut to New England Cable News for an
update on the Watertown chase and listeners heard an unnamed reporter, “Oh, you’re not listening? Well, I don’t know shit.”

•It’s no surprise that Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post was unmatched for sheer bloodymindedness. Here’s the HuffingtonPost.com summary:

The
Post said 12 people had died, when only three had; it said a Saudi man
was a “suspect” in “custody” when he wasn't; and it splashed pictures of
two young “BAG MEN” on its front page even though it did not know
whether they were suspects. They were innocent. One was 17 years old; he
told the Associated Press that he was “scared to go outside.” And that
doesn’t include Post doctoring the photo of an injured spectator to hide
her leg wound.

Rather than apologize, Murdoch blamed others outside the Post.

•Murdoch’s Post wasn’t alone in falsely accusing men of being bombers. The LA Times said “Reddit is apologizing for its role in fueling the social media witch hunts for the Boston bombings
suspects. The social news website . . . became a place for amateur
sleuths to gather and share their conspiracy theories and other ideas on
who may have committed the crimes. The online witch hunts ended up
dragging in several innocent people, including Sunil Tripathi, a
22-year-old Brown University student who went missing last month (and
has since been found dead).

“After viewing the FBI's
photos of the suspects Thursday, Redditors became convinced that
Tripathi was one of the bombers, with countless posts gleefully pointing
out the physical similarities between Tripathi and Suspect No. 2, who
ended up being 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The
growing wave of suspicion surrounding Tripathi led his family to
release a statement the next day saying they knew ‘unequivocally’ that
their son was not involved.

“On
Monday, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin posted a lengthy apology on
the site, saying the crisis ‘showed the best and worst of Reddit's
potential.’ He said the company, as well as several Reddit users and
moderators, had apologized privately to Tripathi's family and wanted ‘to
take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had
to endure. We all need to look at what happened and make sure that in
the future we do everything we can to help and not hinder crisis
situations,’ the post said. ‘Some of the activity on Reddit fueled
online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very
negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the
millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this
happened’."

Reddit
said it does not allow personal information on the site in order to
protect innocent people from being incorrectly identified and
"disrupting or ruining their lives," according to the LA Times. "We
hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark
exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong," Reddit’s Martin
continued. "The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the
types of vindictive Internet witch hunts our no-personal-information
rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different."

The
LA Times added valuable context to what followed the bombings: they “were
the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of
Facebook, Twitter
and Reddit. But the watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled
out of control as legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on the innocent,
shared bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.” The
LA Times added that Boston police asked “overeager” Twitter users to
limit what they posted because that overly detailed tweets could
compromise officers' position and safety.

•Detroit
Free Press editors published a detailed online illustration of how to
make a pressure cooker bomb, like that reportedly used by the Boston
bombers. When their brain fart passed, they took down the instructions
and images. Of course, now, anyone can turn to Jimromenesko.com screen shot of the Detroit Free Press illustration . . .

•Newcomers
to the Tri-State puzzle over the lifelong identification with high/prep
school. When a Cincinnatian was involved in the emergency surgical
response to the Boston Marathon bombings, the Enquirer noted he went to
St. X. Only later did Our Sole Surviving Daily tell us he was graduated
from UC’s medical school before going off to Boston for his surgical
residency.

]]>Even though some members of Mayor Mark Mallory's staff
are getting double-digit raises, the mayor's budget is actually being
downsized to rely on less staff members, ultimately shrinking the mayor's
office budget by $33,000 between July 1 and Dec. 1.

Some
of Mallory's staff obtained raises because they will be taking up the
former duties of Ryan Adcock, who left earlier in the month to help lead
a task force on infant mortality and will not be replaced.

The Cincinnati Enquirerreported
the raises earlier today, but the story at first did not mention that
the budgetary moves will ultimately save the city money. The "Enquirer exclusive" includes a "tell them what you think" section in which citizens can email the mayor's office and copy Enquirer editors. The story was later updated to include the overall savings, though The Enquirer posted a separate blog titled, "Mallory getting an earful on raises," which was a collection of angry emails to the mayor based on the original version of the story.

CityBeat
acquired a memo written by Mallory that outlines the rest of the
plan, which will produce savings: "I will not replace Ryan Adcock on my
staff. Instead, I have divided his responsibilities among my remaining
staff. In addition, I will not hire the two part-time staffers that I
had considered hiring. The additional work in the office will be
supplemented by unpaid interns.

"In
addition, I have enacted internal savings in order to return $20,000
from my FY 2013 office budget to be used for the FY 2014 city budget.
Finally, in preparation of the Mayor’s Office Budget for FY 2014, I am
reducing my office budget by $33,000 for the remaining 5 months of my
term."

Mallory
spokesperson Jason Barron says the mayor will also not be replacing
staff that leaves from this point forward, which could produce more
savings down the line.

As of 6:30 p.m., The Enquirer's homepage still prominently displayed the story out of context, suggesting that the raises will add to the city's $35 million deficit.

Shawn Butler, the mayor's director of community
affairs, was given an 11-percent raise; Barron, the mayor's
director of public affairs, was given a 16-percent raise; and Arlen
Herrell, the mayor's director of international affairs, was given a
20-percent raise. Adcock also obtained a 20-percent raise briefly before
leaving, which Barron described to CityBeat as a budgetary technicality.

Since
Mallory is term-limited, Barron says the savings will only apply to
Mallory's remaining five months. The mayor who replaces Mallory in
December will decide whether to keep or rework Mallory's policies.

Last
year, Barron was paid $66,144 in regular pay, Butler was paid $71,349,
Herrell was paid $59,961 and Adcock was paid $66,049, according to the
city's payroll records. But Barron explained that those numbers were
higher because last year happened to have an extra payday. Under normal
circumstances, Barron is paid $62,740 a year, Butler is paid $67,760,
Adcock was paid $62,740 and Herrell is paid $62,031.]]>• Tuesday’s Enquirer abandoned its traditional timidity
and published bloody color images of victims of Boston Marathon
bombings. Good. I’m sure also there were images too ghastly for the
breakfast table, but the shift is welcome. The inside image of an
elderly runner knocked down by the blast and framed by Boston cops
running toward the explosion was another good decision. He collapsed as
the blast surge hit him in the midst of other runners. We saw that on
TV/online. It was one of the earliest viral images. NPR said the
78-year-old man stood and walked to the finish line, saying he hadn’t
run 26 miles to quit.

• HuffingtonPost.com quickly repeated this potential calumny: “Investigators
have a suspect — a Saudi Arabian national — in the horrific Boston
Marathon bombings, The (New York) Post has learned. Law enforcement sources said the 20-year-old suspect was under guard at an undisclosed Boston hospital.”

About the same time, Massachusetts and Boston officials were telling journalists they had no suspects.

I recall how authorities initially sought someone who
looked like an Arab after the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
was bombed in 1995. How do I know? It was all over the news media. As
the current FBI website puts it, “Coming on the heels of the (first)
World Trade Center bombing in New York two years earlier, the media and
many Americans immediately assumed that the attack was the handiwork of
Middle Eastern terrorists.”

Two white non-Arab Americans were convicted of the
bombing. The only “Arab” link was murderer Timothy McVeigh’s military
service in the first Iraq invasion, Desert Storm, where he won a Bronze
Star. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists continued to weave elaborate links
between the Oklahoma City bombers and Arabs.

• Everyone with a microphone seems
to be telling us the investigation of the Boston bombings will be
complex and unhurried. Many recall how long it took to abandon suspicion
of security guard Richard Jewell as the Atlanta Olympics bomber. It
took two years to identify Eric Rudolph as the bomber and another five
to arrest him. False leads will abound and forensic evidence will be
sought, collected and analyzed. Some will be helpful, some will be
misleading. With so many journalists present, initial coverage largely
was self-correcting. The rumor of seven more bombs or a bomb at the JFK
library was quickly spiked. The story that local officials blew up a
third bomb lasted a little longer. That was half-correct: They blew up a
package/backpack but it was not a bomb. There were only two bombs as of
this writing.

Everyone with a microphone seems to be saying the Boston
bombing investigation will be complex and unhurried. Many recall how
long it took to abandon suspicion of security guard Richard Jewell as
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber. False leads will abound and forensic
evidence will be sought, collected and analyzed. Some will be helpful,
some will be misleading.

• If bombers hoped to create terror, the Boston Marathon
was a smart choice: there would be lots of images from cell phones and
the news media. It fits my theory of 9/11: the initial 2001 attack on
the World Trade Center tower was timed to assure the news media would
get full coverage of the jetliner flying into the second tower.

• Moving on from bloodshed, Rachel Richardson’s Enquirer
story about dogs in the workplace was a smart story, especially part
about socialization being vital to a dog fitting in.

And she pushed my nostalgia button. My first job out of
college was night editing a daily paper in Italy. I bought a Belgian
Shepherd (Groenendael) pup and named him Loki
for the Norse trickster. His mother was a part-wolf/mountain shepherd's
companion and father was an Italian ex-Army K9. With long, silky black
coat, a plume of a tail, alert eyes and ears, Loki was an unbeatable
chick magnet.

His socialization comprised strolling Rome, riding and
waiting in my car, joining me in bars and restaurants, and lying under
my desk at the Rome Daily American at night when I was the only
journalist. I didn't know the breed is famous/infamous for one-person
loyalty and instinct to protect: person, possessions, etc.

Loki didn’t approve of anyone approaching my desk when I
was in the back shop where type was set, pages were composed and the
press run. Anyone else would bring him to his feet, ears back, shoulder
blades up, teeth bared . . . but silent. Even as a pup, he could be
menacing. “Lupo siberiano,” or Siberian wolf, was the Roman nickname for
the breed.

Night messengers who brought engraved zinc plates — photos
for every edition in that ancient era of hot type and flatbed press —
quickly learned to avoid the newsroom and come directly into the back
shop. Loki was a force to be accommodated.

Away from the office, he’d curl up on my Sunbeam Alpine’s
passenger seat and bite anyone who was silly enough to reach into the
car in hopes of a quick theft.

He rarely let go before I returned and that could create
Roman opera buffa. Loki’s victim typically threatened to call police
about my vicious dog and — without telling Loki to let go — I offered to
help by shouting for police. We never did call for police. When
released, the would-be thief unfailingly walked away, cursing me for
enticing him with an open sports car into what he hoped was a crime of
opportunity.

When I worked days, Loki stayed home nearby. His
socialization didn’t accommodate the chaos of a small, crowded newsroom
with strangers coming and going.

Again, thanks for the reminder: fun, smart and god help us, mindful of Enquirer watchdog obligations.

• As anticipated here, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is
following other Newhouse dailies by reducing home deliveries to three
days a week: Sunday and two days to be named later. The PD says it will
print seven days a week for street sales. It also plans to fire about a
third of its newsroom staff. It’s a sad demise of what long was Ohio’s
best daily.

• The Enquirer business section headline was “Survey:
Downtown seen as more positive.” That’s also what the story said, based
on what Downtown Cincinnati Inc. told the paper. The accompanying photo
showed people playing in Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine. People
feeling positive downtown just weren’t photogenic.

• Read Gina Kolata’s April 7 New York Times story on a new
understanding of the role of red meat in heart trouble. It’s among the
best story telling in a long time. It’s a complicated subject but she
draws us in with researchers sitting down to sizzling sirloin breakfast
“for the sake of science.” It gets even better as she explains that the
science involves “a little-studied chemical that is burped out by
bacteria . . . “ Talk about imagery. Send photos.

• NPR is killing its Monday-Thursday afternoon call-in
show, Talk of the Nation, and we’ll all be poorer for it. Talk of the
Nation involves civil, lengthy discussion of timely topics. NPR is
working with Boston’s WBUR to create a program for Talk’s 2-4 p.m. time
slot. NPR says member stations wanted a program more like Morning
Edition and All Things Considered in the afternoon and evening. Too bad.
Expect lots of canned (and cheaply produced) interviews that seem to be
the promise of the new show.

• Journalists should refuse to name sources to whom
they’ve promised confidentiality. The corollary, of course, is to ask
first whether we’re willing to serve time for contempt of court if we
reject a judge's demands that we break our word and name our source(s).
In that sense, we probably don’t think it will happen to us and almost
mindlessly promise confidentiality to encourage sources to talk to us.

So when there is a court confrontation, the refusenik
journalist typically is cast as the hero and the judge as a mindless
apparatchik and/or tool of the prosecutor. That’s too simple. Reporters
are free to ask their sources to release them from their promise of
confidentiality. Judges should compel testimony only when prosecutors
have used every other way to identify reporters’ sources and silence
could pervert justice. Judges are on the hot seat as much as reporters.

The latest unresolved contest involves Jana Winter who
quoted unnamed law enforcement personnel when she reported that Aurora, Colo., gunman James Holmes sent an incriminating notebook to his
psychiatrist before massacring moviegoers. FoxNews.com’s
Winter said the notebook was filled with violent notes and drawings.
Now that the apparently accurate information is out, I don’t see how the
sources’ identities matter to a fair trial if there ever is one.

Rather, I like what Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor
at the University of Maryland, told the New York Times: “If you
required reporters to disclose their sources every time there was a
minor leak in a high profile criminal case, the jails would be filled in
America with journalists.”

• London’s Daily Mail reports the auction of a log book
kept by the RAF navigator whose “bouncing bomb” breached a vital German
dam during World War II. The raid was portrayed in the film, The
Dambusters. The Daily Mail’s story was spoiled only by a photo of the
unique bomb being dropped by a twin-engine plane; Dambusters flew
four-engine Lancaster heavy bombers.

• Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is loathed to degrees that W and Obama cannot imagine. Her
death last week sparked national demonstrations of joy even as the
government and palace hoped that her almost-state funeral in London
could be protected from demonstrators. Haters danced in the street,
daubed “Rust in Hell” about the Iron Lady, and sang “Ding, Dong, the
Witch Is Dead.” That forced BBC to decide whether to play that song from
the
Wizard of Oz movie on BBC radio shows dedicated to hit songs or on news
programs about Thatcher’s life and death. The song reportedly became
No. 1 on iTunes before the funeral and it was headed for the top of the
pop charts, pushed by Thatcher haters. At last report, BBC’s director
general said only a 5-second snippet would be allowed on the main radio
channel. New to his job, he pissed off everyone.

• Patrice Lumumba was the Congo’s first prime minister
after Belgium granted independence to the huge, potentially wealthy and
criminally unprepared colony. He was murdered not long before I began
working on the Congo border in Northern Rhodesia. He already was a
martyr-hero of the Left when I studied African anthropology in London.

Lumumba’s abduction, torture and murder were popularly
assumed to be a CIA operation, working with Belgians, rebels in
copper-rich Katanga province, and others who coveted the Congo’s mineral
wealth and mines.

Now, a curious news story in London’s Telegraph says
Britain’s worldwide Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) engineered
Lumumba’s death. More curious is the weight it gives to a second-hand
source. It quotes Lord Lea of Crondall quoting Baroness
(Daphne) Park of Monmouth, who was the senior MI6 officer in the Congo
then, as saying she "organised it.”

Lord Lea told the Telegraph, "It so
happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park – we were
colleagues from opposite sides of the Lords – a few months before she
died in March 2010. She had been consul and first secretary in
Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this
was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there. I mentioned the
uproar surrounding Lumumba's abduction and murder, and recalled the
theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. 'We did,' she
replied, 'I organised it.'"

The Telegraph said Lord Lea claimed
Baroness Park reasonably was concerned that Lumumba might be a communist
siding with Soviet Russia. After all, African and Asian
independence leaders like Lumumba, South Africa’s Mandela and others
often found their most active Cold War support mainly in Moscow and the
wider Communist movement.

Initially blaming the CIA wasn’t irrational. By Lumumba’s
death in 1961, the CIA had engineered the overthrow of elected
governments in Iran and Guatemala and botched the Bay of Pigs invasion
to topple Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Belgium apologized in 2002 for failing to prevent
Lumumba’s death. In 2006, the Telegraph said, “documents showed the CIA
had plotted to assassinate him but the plot was abandoned.”

]]>Amanda
VanBenschoten’s reporting on both sides of the river has won her the
new position of Northern Kentucky news columnist at the Enquirer. We’ve
been friends since she was an undergrad in my ethics class. I had the
pleasure of holding up a copy of the NKU’s paper, The Northerner, and
showing our class her first page 1 byline. She was editor of NKU’s
paper, The Northerner, and worked for a Northern Kentucky weekly where
she regularly broke stories ahead of daily reporters. I warned the
then-editor of the Kentucky Enquirer to follow Amanda’s work because,
“she’ll eat your lunch.” Soon after, that wise editor hired Amanda. I’m looking forward to Amanda finding her own voice after years of
quoting others.

Scott
Aiken died this month. We’ve been colleagues and friends for more than
four decades. My wife and I moved to Cincinnati in 1967 and subscribed
to the Enquirer. I called Scott to compliment the analyses of foreign
events for which he’d been hired on the Enquirer editorial page. After
swapping tales about our work overseas and people we knew there, he
offered to introduce me to Bob Harrod, the local editor, who hired me
for weekend reporting. It was the perfect antidote to grad school. That
began 30-plus years at the Enquirer for me. Scott and I stayed in touch
after he left daily journalism for corporate public relations. Our
friendship survived my reporting of accusations of illegal wiretapping
by Cincinnati Bell; Scott was head of the telephone company’s public
relations. Our last lunch shared stories of his and Anne’s visit to
Rome. Sheila McLaughlin’s obit on March 9 covers his career admirably,
including Scott’s accidental matchmaking for a young
reporter/colleague.

• Urbi et orbi.
Accusations of omission and commission by Pope Francis when he was a
priest and Jesuit leader during Argentina’s murderous “Dirty War”
demonstrate how religious leaders risk charges of collaboration when a
dictatorship falls. Recent examples taint the Russian Orthodox Church
and South Africa’s Dutch Reform Church. But it’s a rare priest who rises
to the modern papacy without the historians, news media and others
questioning their careers. Pius XII is accused of being too close to
Nazi Germany as diplomat Cardinal Pacelli before World War II. John
XXIII was the subject of debate whether, as a chaplain sergeant in World
War I, he gave Italian troops the order to leave their trenches, “go
over the top” and attack. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Ratzinger was drafted
into the Hitler Youth near the end of World War II, something everyone
learned when he became Benedict XVI.

•The
200-plus complaints about papal coverage moved NPR ombudsman Edward
Schumacher-Matos to admit he, too, was “pope-ed out.” One listener
wondered if NPR stood for National Papal Radio? Schumacher-Matos blogged
that “NPR aired 69 stories since Pope Benedict
XVI announced his resignation Feb. 11 and Pope Francis was selected as
his successor Wednesday. That averages out to about two radio magazine
or call-in segments per day, not including the steady drumbeat of
shorter items delivered by hourly newscasts that are not transcribed. Most
of the complaints have concerned the 47 stories that aired in the four
weeks between the day after Benedict announced his resignation and the
morning before Francis was announced — a period during which there was
less major news about the subject and more ‘horse-race’ speculation
about who might be selected.”

•Of
course, there was a Cincinnati connection to the papal election: Janice
Sevre-Duszynska, a contributing writer to Article 25, Cincinnati’s
street paper dedicated to human rights, was detained by Italian police
for demonstrating at the Vatican for women’s ordination. The French news
agency, AFP, missed her connection to Article 25, identifying her only
as “an excommunicated female priest” from Lexington, Ky., and a member of
the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. It was unclear whether
Sevre-Duszynska was arrested or removed as a distraction when cardinals
assembled to elect a new pope. AFP did not respond to CityBeat
questions about her detention. She was dressed in liturgical robes and
carrying a banner, “Women Priests are Here.” AFP quoted Sevre-Duszynska
as saying, "As the cardinals meet for their conclave to elect the new pope, women are being ordained around the world! There are already 150 female priests in the world. The people are ready for change."

•Much
as I would have loved to be back in Rome covering the election of the
pope, there was an even better assignment that kicked my envy into
overdrive. The Economist sent a reporter on 112-day road trip through
and around Africa. I once hoped to travel the mythic Cairo Road from
Capetown to Cairo. Not going to happen. The Economist’s reporter did
that and more. He found more cause for cautious optimism than is
reflected in typical stories of rebellion, massacre, poverty, disease
and stolen elections.

•Why
did Cincinnati Business Courier take down its online story about Henry
Heimlich’s attempts to save his reputation and that of his Heimlich
Maneuver? Granted, it wasn’t flattering, but it didn’t go beyond what
Curmudgeon has reported. Reporter James Ritchie forwarded my request
for an explanation and editor Rob Daumeyer responded, “Thanks for asking, but we don't have anything to add for you.”

•I
like the tabloid Enquirer. I worked on daily and weekly tabloids
overseas; it’s a familiar format. Whether readers enjoy turning pages to
find stories promoted on section covers is uncertain; with logos, ads
and visuals, there’s little else. Inside, long stories jump from page
to page to accommodate reduced page size. I hope Enquirer editors
recognize the power of the back page in each section and treat it as
prime news space. And I’m looking forward to reporters and editors
learning to produce sharp, short stories suited to tabloids; it still
reads like the old Enquirer.

•Curmudgeon
Notes on Feb. 20 shouldn’t take credit for Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster
over Obama’s assassination by drone. However, the Kentucky Republican
echoed Curmudgeon’s anxieties whether Obama will use drones to kill
Americans in our country. To his credit, Paul’s almost 13-hour standup
routine forced an answer from prevaricating Attorney General Eric
Holder. Holder’s letter repeated and answered Paul’s question: "Does the
President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an
American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer to that
question is no.” Perfectly clear? No. Who defines combat? Deadly
confrontations with feds at Ruby Ridge, Wounded Knee, or David Koresh’s
Branch Davidian Ranch near Waco, TX?

•Enquirer’s
Cliff Peale is probing the costs of post-secondary education and how
many recent debt-burdened college grads can’t find full-time employment
requiring their costly degrees. Coincidentally, Cincinnati Business
Courier reports how local vacancies for skilled workers threaten the
region’s economy. Is the conventional wisdom — everyone must earn a BA
or more — undermining our economic security? Maybe Peale can probe high
school curricula and counseling to see if capable students are being
steered away from well-paid blue collar careers and into crippling debt
for degrees of dubious value. Maybe it’s time to interview welders,
carpenters, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, etc., to find out
what their ROI (Return on Investment) is.

•It’s an old problem: courtiers mistaking their privilege of emptying the king’s chamber pots for royal power. Poynter.org reports this example from the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service:

Barr
quoted Rosenzweig, saying, “I need to see your camera right now.” She
called Barr’s presence in the non-press area an “unfair advantage” over
the other members of the media (whatever that meant). Rosenzweig watched
him delete the photos, Barr said, and then she looked at Barr’s iPhone
to make sure no photos were saved there.

“I
assumed that I’d violated a protocol,” Barr told Capital News Service.
“I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she was following proper
procedures.”

J-school
Dean Lucy Dalglish complained in a letter, saying, “Rockville is not a
third-world country where police-state style media censorship is
expected.” Biden press secretary Kendra Barkoff responded with an
apology to Dalglish and Barr.

My comment: Dalglish is a lawyer. Before taking the dean’s job she was executive
director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It’s
ironic that her student reporter didn’t know there is no “protocol” or “proper
procedures” that required him to give up his images. He should have
held on to his images and phone and told Rosenzweig to fuck off.

•Republicans
evince an unnatural fascination with our dead ambassador at the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi. Often, in their frenzy of blame, Obama critics
mistakenly call the torched facility the “Embassy.” Ignorance now
appears to be nonpartisan. Maybe repetition has warped liberal minds.
For instance, in her blog on the thedailybeast.com, Caitlin Dickson repeated the error. In Libya, our embassy is in Tripoli, the capital.

The Boston Globe’s boston.com wasn’t immune. Under
the headline, “Paul Krugman Files Chapter 13 Bankruptcy,” someone using
the nom de plume “Prudent Investor” wrote that “Paul Krugman, the king
of Keynesianism and a strong supporter of the delusion that you can
print your way out of debt, faces depression at his very own doors.
According to this report in Austria’s Format online mag, Krugman owes
$7.35 million while assets to his name came in at a very meager $33,000.
This will allow the economist and New York Times blogger to get a feel
of how the majority of Americans feel about their dreadful lives . . . “

Romenesko
says Globe editor Brian McGrory told Washington Post’s Erik Wemple,
“The (Krugman) story arrived deep within our site from a third party
vendor who partners on some finance and market pages on our site. We
never knew it was there till we heard about it from outside.” The paper,
McGrory says, did “urgent work to get it the hell down” from boston.com.
McGrory adds, “The idea that we’d have a partner on our site is
actually news to me” and the Globe plans to “address our relationship
with that vendor.”

My
comment: the editor of New England’s dominant daily has a “third party
vendor” who provides content for business pages and the editor doesn’t
know what that content is?

•Paul Krugman, who isn’t bankrupt (above), responded tongue in cheek on his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. “OK, I’m an evil person — and my scheming has paid off. On
Friday I started hearing from friends about a fake story making the
rounds about my allegedly filing for personal bankruptcy; I even got
asked about the story by a reporter from Russian television, who was
very embarrassed when I told him it was fake. But I decided not to post
anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing
media outlets would fall for the hoax. And Breitbart.com came through! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go give a lavishly paid speech to Friends of Hamas.”

•Weekly
Standard senior writer Matt Labash’s March 18 column suggests he’d be a
great guy to meet in a bar. Here’s a sample: “ . . . there are enough
headline-hunting researchers making enough questionable discoveries
(about health) that the four shakiest words in the English language have
come to be, ‘a new study shows’.” And here’s another: “I am a
professional journalist. It’s my job to pretend to know things that I
don’t.”

]]>

Enquirer
reporters and editors should be satisfied with their initial tabloid
effort. Today’s inaugural edition — smaller and printed in Columbus — is
a curious hybrid. It arrived on time. It feels and looks like a
tabloid, but it reads like a familiar Enquirer rather than something
exciting and new.

That
might not be bad. Others — who haven’t spent 50-plus years in the newspaper
and wire service trade and worked on two tabloids — will decide whether
the tabloid Enquirer works well enough to buy. That’s important because
print ads bring in many times the cash of online ads.

Page
1 is a showcase. Catch the readers’ attention to turn them inside to
highly promoted stories. That’s tabloid. Enquirer designers have been
refining this for months on larger pages last printed yesterday.

Page
2 is weather and other stuff. My question: Will older readers complain
about the small type? Readers who need glasses probably are the
majority.

The
organization of the rest of the paper is familiar and most stories are
short. Good. Few stories today require more than that, especially one
that continues for days and weeks. Regular readers will learn enough.
Readers who are unsatisfied can learn more elsewhere without abandoning
the Enquirer. It would be no crime if longer versions appeared on Cincinnati.com. That could be a productive synergy.

If
there is a problem in the news pages, it’s the black/white inside news
photos. Sports suffers most. Too many are too small, too dark. That
could be an inking problem on the new Columbus Dispatch presses. If not,
it would be ironic if the new Enquirer format meant fewer inside color
photos and photographers having to relearn black-and-white photography.

And
small news photos. Here’s where the format cramps. A large photo
doesn’t leave much room for type and there is a limit to how many times
readers will go to another page to learn more about the pictured event.

The
special promotional section about the paper — with names and images of
the staff — is a keeper in addition to the existing online contact list.
It was good to see old colleagues and friends looking well and to put
faces to new names.

My
one complaint is that the shift in headline type. Now, news stories and
ads that imitate news stories now have the same or similar bold black
headlines. That’s bad. Previously, news and ads had starkly different
type faces. That was an honest effort to alert readers to the
difference. I hope the Enquirer will find a new type face for ads since the bold, black headlines work for tabloid news.

Having
nursed a new daily to life years ago, I still can recall the pleasure
of holding that first edition. I hope Enquirer journalists know that
feeling today.

]]>

City Council approved a plan
to lease the city’s parking assets to the Port of Greater Cincinnati
Development Authority, but the plan is now being held up by a judge’s
temporary restraining order (TRO). The plan was passed with an emergency
clause, which is meant to expedite the plan’s implementation, but it
also makes the law immune to referendum. The judge’s TRO, which will
delay implementation for at least one week, will provide enough time to
process a lawsuit filed by Curt Hartman, an attorney who represents the
Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST), on behalf of
local activists who oppose the plan and argue it should be subject to
referendum. The parking plan will lease the city’s parking assets to
fund development projects, including a 30-story tower and a downtown
grocery store, and help balance the deficit for the next two fiscal
years. Opponents say they’re concerned about the plan leading to parking
rate hikes, and they say the plan will not fix the city’s structural
deficits.

Before the final vote on the parking plan, City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr. gave a presentation
to City Council that showed options for reducing Cincinnati’s
structural deficit, including a reduction or elimination of
lower-ranked programs in the city’s Priority-Driven Budgeting Process, a
reduction in subsidies to health clinics that are getting more money
from Obamacare, the semi-automation of solid waste collection or the
introduction of new or increased fees for certain programs, among other
changes.

Ohio senators are pushing a law that would make records of people licensed to carry concealed firearms in Ohio off-limits to journalists.
The senators say they were inspired to push the law after a New York
newspaper published the names and addresses of permit holders in three
counties. Dennis Hetzel, executive director of the Ohio Newspaper
Association, says the law will decrease government transparency and
limit rights: “I wish the pro-gun forces would be as respectful of the
First Amendment as they are of the second, and they should be fearful of
excessive government secrecy.”

The superintendent and treasurer of the Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy, a charter school, were indicted
after allegedly using school funds to go to “Girls weekends” in
Chicago, sightseeing tours through California and Europe and a trip to
Boston to see Oprah — allegedly costing taxpayers more than $148,000. Dave Yost, state auditor, said in a statement, “The
audacity of these school officials is appalling. The good work by our
auditors and investigators has built the strongest possible case to
ensure they can never use the public treasury as their personal travel
account again.”

The Ohio Department of Transportation and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet are working together
to make the case that any delays in the Brent Spence Bridge project
will hurt Greater Cincinnati’s economy. Most people involved in the
issue agree the bridge needs rebuilding, but not everyone agrees on how
the project should be funded. Northern Kentucky politicians in
particular have strongly opposed instituting tolls — one of the leading
ideas for funding the project.

In public hearings yesterday, service industry officials
said Gov. John Kasich’s budget plan, which will expand the state’s sales
tax to apply to more service, would drive some service providers out of Ohio
and make the state less competitive. Among other complaints, Carter
Strang, president of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, said
the plan could make it harder for Ohioans to access legal counsel by
increasing costs and reducing employment in the legal sector. CityBeat covered Kasich’s budget proposal in detail here.

State Auditor Yost filed a subpoena
to get JobsOhio’s financial records after the agency failed to turn
them over. The subpoena puts Yost at odds with Kasich, a fellow
Republican who established JobsOhio, a nonprofit company, in an attempt
to bring more jobs to the state and replace the Ohio Department of
Development.

Hamilton County is launching the Hamilton County Community Re-entry Action Plan,
which will help integrate ex-convicts back into society. Commissioner
Todd Portune told WVXU the plan will help with overpopulation in jails
and prisons: “When you build (jail and prison) facilities, the
population in them always seems to rise to meet whatever the (capacity)
level is in the facility. You never seem to have enough space. The real
answer beyond facilities is that we've got to turn around the lives of
the individuals who are in our corrections system that have made bad
choices.”

The University of Cincinnati says it won’t block an outdoor display of vagina pictures on campus.

Yesterday, Kentucky’s U.S. Sen. Rand Paul held a nearly 13-hour filibuster to protest any possible use of drone strikes on American soil. Paul was joined by
senators from both sides of the aisle in his opposition to using the
strikes, which were used in Yemen in 2011 to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American
citizen accused of being a high-ranking al-Qaeda official.

The same Cleveland judge who made a woman hold an “idiot” sign for driving around a school bus is making a 58-year-old man hold another sign
for threatening officers in a 911 call. The sign will apologize to
officers and read, “I was being an idiot and it will never happen
again.” The man will also go to jail for 90 days.

There used to be camels in Arctic Canada,
but that shouldn’t be too surprising — camels currently reside in the
Gobi Desert, which can reach -40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.